


before the flood

by pearthery



Category: Gintama
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, and gintoki being a terrible student but unfortunately shoyo has a soft spot for that, i have returned to my brand of shoyo-gintoki journey vibes, pre-shoka sonjuku, starring yoshida shoyo's life lessons 101
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:48:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28106559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearthery/pseuds/pearthery
Summary: "It's water spinach," he says to the sky. "You helped me harvest some from the stream this morning.""Did I? I don't remember that.""Ah, I suppose you wouldn't," Shoyo shakes his head, "seeing as you were half-asleep in the grass, callously ignoring your teacher's labour. What kind of lazy imp did I pick up? Slothfulness is the root of sin, Gintoki.""You say that about everything," says Gintoki.The antediluvian period.
Relationships: Sakata Gintoki & Yoshida Shouyou
Comments: 9
Kudos: 35





	before the flood

**Author's Note:**

> an accompanying poem for this!! 
> 
> Civilizing the Child — Lisel Mueller

"What're you looking for?" Gintoki asks blithely as he kicks his feet, peering down into the clearing from his arboreal perch. His head is tossed back, leaning into the rough bark of the sturdy trunk, and his arms are tucked lazily across his stomach, fingers linked together. He asks this, out of curiosity and impulse, but in all honesty, cares not very much for the answer.

Shoyo stays quiet and doesn't reply, but that's because he has his head wedged partway into their travel bag, and it's alright if he doesn't answer anyway because Gintoki doesn't need to know. They're a little strange, the both of them; Shoyo has his head on a permanent swivel and Gintoki has to remind himself to blink, and the other day Shoyo rolled through a patch of nettles while he was sleeping and didn't flinch a bit, even when Gintoki started pinching him on the shoulder to get them all out. Alright, maybe that last one isn't all that strange—people like to posture, don't they? Pretend they aren't hurting? Though Shoyo's not one for pretenses—but it was still unsettling to hear silence where there should be sound. Even the dead make noise as their skin sloughs off.

But Gintoki's become used to Shoyo's silence. He fills the gaps with meaningless chatter, a little bit like how the wind blows leaves and branches together to fill lapses in the canopy, but mostly like how Gintoki makes noise to let Shoyo know he's still here.

"Do we have any sweets left?" Gintoki wonders. "What about the honey candies? The ones we got from the old lady. Those ones are nice." 

Shoyo's probably looking for their knife. It's somewhere in their travel bag, but Gintoki doesn't really pay attention to the locations of anything but the sweets, because obviously everything else comes second. Third, even. He knows his priorities. Sometimes, when it's his turn to play pack mule, his priority is actually their little bundle of belongings, but usually, it's hedonism. Shoyo clearly doesn't think all that much of Gintoki's priorities, because he keeps trying to instill something called "discipline" in his "rambunctious and unruly personality" and that's why they take turns carrying The Bag. 

When Gintoki carries The Bag, it always seems that they climb far more mountains than usual, and the slopes seem extra steep, which is not ideal and not the deal he signed up for when he decided to follow this weird adult around. Walking for too long makes his feet tingle and his hands go puffy—something about more blood pumping to his heart and less blood in his hands, blah blah blah, blood vessels and vasodilation and "Would you like me to rub your hands for you, Gintoki?" and "Shoyo, you're not even sweating, this is really unfair," and Gintoki digging into The Bag and finishing half of their water supplies—so it feels a lot like a targeted attack by the universe that these two unpleasantries consistently align. 

But usually it stays with Shoyo. The Bag, that is. All their valuables are shoved in there—money, food and water, medicine, sweets, the knife—and while Shoyo trusts him, it turns out that valuable things are heavy, and Gintoki's shoulders are not yet strong enough to carry them for all that long. 

"Do you remember where the knife is, Gintoki?" Shoyo finally asks, pulling his face from the black hole of miscellaneous mysteries and Gintoki's stash of candies (diligently guarded). "I can't seem to find it."

"Huh? Uh, it's prolly buried in the rice. I think you left it there while you were chopping up that wild celery." 

After wiggling his hand around the black hole, Shoyo tugs the small blade out of the bag and shoots him a fond look thinly disguised as exasperation. He's trying to look annoyed, Gintoki thinks, but he's not very good at it—the set of his mouth is too soft, and his eyes are warmer than a summer's day, and his sigh sounds far too much like a muffled laugh. 

"It's water spinach," he says to the sky. "You helped me harvest some from the stream this morning." 

"Did I? I don't remember that."

"Ah, I suppose you wouldn't," Shoyo shakes his head, "seeing as you were half-asleep in the grass, callously ignoring your teacher's labour. What kind of lazy imp did I pick up? Slothfulness is the root of sin, Gintoki." 

"You say that about everything," says Gintoki.

"Well—it applies. Even the best intentions, and the most gentle of emotions can lead to hurt and sorrow. Everything should be taken in moderation—joy, sadness, work, leisure. Your disrespectful behaviour. Perhaps I should give you more chores?" Gintoki's eyes widen. "The world runs on an understanding of balance: give and take, and things that level each other out. More than that, temperance may be the greatest individual virtue. You have to admit you are very self-indulgent."

His face is quite serious, and his lips are pursed. 

"I think monologues should be taken in moderation," says Gintoki, enunciating all his consonants, and Shoyo brings a hand up to his face and sighs deeply for several seconds, a very prolonged inhale followed by a much more prolonged exhale, sounding somewhat like himself several months ago when he was teaching Gintoki the alphabet and sounding out the vowels as he traced characters in the dirt, but much more tired.

"You're such a troublesome child," Shoyo says, hiding his smile behind his palm. "What happened to the little demon who stumbled over his Japanese?" 

He does that a lot, trying to mask his emotions, like he's not used to people looking at the scrunch of skin between his eyes and knowing that he's confused, or having his cheek pat whenever his face comes into reach of Gintoki's muddy hands. He finds it easy to hold a sword, and to teach Gintoki how to hold a sword, and he seems to feel no remorse at knocking Gintoki off his feet or thumping him over the head with a neat fist—but that's alright, Gintoki's realised by now that Shoyo's some sort of casually violent monster—so Shoyo's not usually awkward. But when it comes to talking, or when they're sitting together in the forest and Gintoki is poking fun at him, or when they're sharing food over a fire and all the songbirds have gone to sleep, Shoyo sometimes seems like he's not sure how to be a person.

He's awkward in a subtle, inconspicuous sort of way. The sort of way where instead of nudging back with a cheeky comeback—you know, how most people function, or at least, Gintoki thinks they do, based on all the half-feral village kids he's spied on, and gossiping housewives, and good-natured market-goers, and cantankerous old geezers—Shoyo decides to word-vomit wisdom instead. Because he doesn't know how to hold a conversation without turning it into a lesson. 

He's a good teacher, of course: his words always feel like something important, and he leaves careful silences in-between so his massive collection of ready-to-go proverbs can sink in properly. But sometimes Gintoki doesn't want a teacher. 

That's alright, isn't it? Kids ditch class sometimes. 

"I dunno," Gintoki says. "You taught him to be a person. If I come down and help you boil the water spinach, will you stop lecturing me?" 

Shoyo laughs again, still tucked behind his hand, but at least he's not being quiet. "I make no promises."

**Author's Note:**

> i'm going to attempt organisation and collect all of my shortfics of this really very specific genre because i can't stop writing them!!!


End file.
